The Mirror of La Granja
A violinist named Lopez Manrico, having toured the world to acclaim, learns of the death of his great-uncle, the Conde de Quederos, and inherits the family's castillo near Cuenca, Castile. He chooses to occupy the Suite of the Mirrors, a chamber built around sixteen mirrors crafted at La Granja by an earlier Conde, a nobleman consumed by the era's obsession with Venetian and French glassmaking. That ancestor had spent his final years chasing a singular ambition: a "magic mirror" so pure it would refuse to reflect solid matter and instead reveal only spirit and dream. Alone in the mirrored drawing-room, Lopez Manrico discovers that the central glass, framed uniquely in buds, eggs, and folded leaves, reflects nothing at all — not his body, not the chandelier's light. Unsettled but drawn in, he plays his violin before it and finds that a particular melody, the old Spanish Saraband, summons a faint white shape from its depths. Searching his uncle's library, he unearths a hidden Arabic treatise, translated by a Spanish Jew, arguing that every body resonates to its own musical chord and that the right tone can recall the dead. Convinced he has stumbled on that tone, he spends successive nights transposing the Saraband until, in the key of F minor, the figure resolves into a young Moorish dancing girl in antique dress, dancing and gesturing to him with mute, pleading eyes. Lopez Manrico becomes consumed by her. He isolates himself completely, refusing all visitors and abandoning his place in local society, playing to her nightly and grieving each dawn when his exhausted arm lets her fade. Servants and neighbors whisper that the "madness of the De Quederos" has claimed him too. Over months his violin playing shifts from formal music to raw expressions of longing, rage, and grief, frightening the household and travelers on the road below. On the Night of the Dead, he stages a private wedding to his phantom, dressing in Renaissance courtier's costume and filling the room with flowers. His playing finally draws her fully forth, and for the first time she steps free of the glass to stand beside him. She identifies herself as Zarabanda, the Moorish mistress of King Philip II, for whom the Saraband dance was named. Her first wish is not for her rescuer but for Philip: she begs to see him, to explain that she never abandoned him, that she was imprisoned before she could keep their planned meeting and had no way to send word before he left for his marriage to Mary of England. Lopez Manrico must tell her that Philip died three centuries earlier; she had not known how much time had passed, and the revelation crushes her, since she can now never clear her name in his eyes. Grief giving way to intimacy, Zarabanda recalls being painted by Titian, seated with Philip at her feet, and Lopez Manrico protests that his own gift, life itself, should outweigh Philip's crown. Their conversation turns to tenderness; he presses his lips to her hand, and, overcome by her exotic beauty and the vision of a vanished, sensuous East that she embodies, draws her into an embrace. Just as their lips are about to meet, the great mirror shatters with a violent crash, and she vanishes, leaving nothing but the residue of chemical dust in the air. At his feet lies a bracelet dropped in the moment of her disappearance, inscribed "Philip, To His Moorish Love" — the only physical trace that his vision, and his rival's claim on her, were ever real. The tale closes on Lopez Manrico alone at the window as dawn breaks, holding the one relic of a love he could summon from three hundred years of silence but never fully possess, undone finally by his own ancestor's dangerous, half-mastered art of resurrecting the dead through sound and glass.
By Edna Worthley Underwood · First published 1911 · Genre: Paranormal Romance, Gothic Romance, Psychological Fiction